A Pictorial Web of Strokes on White
Andrej Medved
The painting of Milenko Prvacki is made of fragments, planes filled with
traces from the everyday. These traces -figures, objects- establish relations
that at first glance may seem unimportant. Yet they are what defines the
pictorial space as well as the communicative arena in which the artist tells
us of his experience. They are vital remnants, caught in a web of strokes
and a field of white, which far transcend the merely aesthetic. Such remnants
are at once physical and metaphysical: spontaneous, sensuous marks from
the unplanned journeys of the artist's hand; and at the same time, nothing
less than the very essence and content of the painter's production.
Islands, circles and oases; poetic archetypes enmeshed in the inter-net
of the picture, originals indexed in an atlas permanently renewed; a collection
preserving the image from being lost, expelled, exhaled into the whiteness
and its interlocking of lines, figures and strokes; a field of white blanketing
a broken and undulating monochromatic foundation: these are the building
blocks of Prvacki's images. Beyond fragmentation and multiplication, the
picture exudes a sense of totality and wholeness. The completeness of
the construction and artistic texture lies in Prvacki's subtle poetics
of figures and objects, a pure realm free from distortion or inversion.
More immediately still than the usual historical questioning -situating
the work vis-à-vis contemporary painting, or Prvacki's own internal
development-, these pictures confront the viewer with an enigmatic white
envelope, an undefined space into which is woven their artistic matrix.
The very texture of the pictures, with their systems of signs strung like
constellations of archaeological fragments hovering in hopelessly level,
horizontal planes, requires further, studious reading.
What challenges us most is the space of this whiteness, not the hue of
skin and complexion but a space in itself, of many depths, like the body
of a body and the body of a painting. A thin and transparent layer over
an absent background, this is a space of persistence, of resistance, the
cosmos of an amoebic microworld of symbolic forms and intertwined relations.
As though time had come to a standstill and nothing could possibly happen
anymore; as though we had reached the end of our journey and had only
ourselves left to face. Around us are only traces, traces of traces, in
a suspended white world. This is a space in which there is neither air
nor matter, no walls and windows, doors or roofs; a space that does not
radiate and does not reflect rays, open to infinity yet our prison, where
light has mutated into a veil, a screen; into light that does not lend
itself to the sense of sight, but instead sees us; into a world that does
not recognise difference and distance. And nonetheless, in the midst of
this rarefied air, we feel a spiritual remainder, a spiritual gale -the
spiritual "drive" of painting.
This interior, enclosed in white, in a non-space, the possible prelude
to the fall of everything into the abyss of memory and the cosmos, that
is to say, an implosion and an explosion all at once, signals the transformation
of the body, the transition from the sensory to the spiritual.
Whiteness, light. The entire space is marked by light: a momentary vision
of some moment of which we know neither the end nor the beginning, neither
sense nor content. All round us is glory, enlightenment, but this is not
the light of sun. In this light that permeates the space of the picture
from no obvious source, dwells lust, a longing for clarification and awakening
of the world. The viewer is enticed into a space in which he is entirely
on his own, in himself.
This light is also absence -on the surface, in this life, the light is
presence in another world, in a space of its own; it is internal and it
is heavenly enlightenment.
And the figures and strokes scattered horizontally through the vaults
of heaven of the painter's space are not merely support points maintaining
the space of the picture; they are in reality Stigma. Not on the skin,
in the blood, in the flesh, but in a whiteness which is thin and fluid,
dissolved, so that we can float in it (though still with an earthly image),
as in dreams, in water, in dance and in the belly, in a transparent maternal
wrapping, in the buoyancy of one's own spirit. Before us is an occurrence,
a fresh sublimation of the spirit -spirit of painting and human spirit.
The image of the spirit is thus returned to itself. Now, at last, it is
only in itself, its very own. This unification is a moment of fusion and
re-appropriation. Come with me! Prvacki's paintings cry out for the return
to the self. These are images without truth, providing instead their own
binding understanding.
This discussion of the trace at the heart of Prvacki's painting rests
of course on the insight of Jacques Derrida in his On Grammatology:
"This deconstruction of presence goes through a deconstruction of
consciousness, thus through the irreducible concept of trace… This
trace opens the first externality in general, the enigmatic relation of
the living to its other and internality to externality: the becoming-space
(devenir-espace), spatialisation… Spatialisation (we will find that
this word expresses the articulation of space and time, of the becoming-space
of time and the becoming-time of space) is always the unnoticeable, non-present
and non-conscious… Primal-script as spatialisation cannot in phenomenological
experience give presence as such. It marks dead time in the presence of
the living present, in the general form of presence… The subjection
of the trace of full presence, (…) the debasement of script as speech
that dreams of its own fullness, are gestures that demand an onto-theology
when it defines the archaeological and eschatological sense of being as
presence, as parousía, as living without diaeresis".
These traces are none other than the deconstruction of some meta-model,
that is to say the author's testing of its coherence and the functioning
of specific chosen primal images. In this, the entire historical background
of the primal image is unimportant. The structure of the web of artistic
texture is historically anachronistic and is not -to use a linguistic
expression- historicised. Rather, it is outside time, and despite the
clear transformations always the same, immanent; such that we bear witness
to basic changes of original -religious- speech into the planning of a
new language. In this sense, we can without hesitation speak of the artistic
structure of Prvacki's images as an original poetics of language. Such
a language simultaneously erases all ornament, rhetoric, temporal appurtenances,
and anomalies that erupt from actual social systems or everyday practice.
The artistic structure of these works is not a complex one, a special
visual symbolism, a strict superstructural meta-artistic model that must
first be coded and regulated and thus prevents spontaneity. What is entailed
are clear, at one and the same instant strict and spontaneous paradigmatic
substitutions of a basic visual scheme in which only the syntactic model
is important, an endless series of fragments of the basic artistic structure.
The rejected space of these images (in oblivion, in absence, in the nullity
of imprinted traces) is reconstructed in paradigmatic examples as a created
web of fragmented strokes in ever renewed syntheses and/or dialectic unravellings.
Before us stands or falls a calligraphic cosmos of sorts, postulated by
poetic means. Semantically, this universe rests upon the nullification
of all signs, or to borrow a Buddhist expression sarvadharma-sunyata.
Sunyata represents "all emptiness which is fullness" and "fullness
which is all emptiness"; painting means pure art as such, which transforms
all these signs spiritually, sensually, rationally, into traces that are
merely differences-in-differences, traces-in-traces.
Andrej Medved is a writer, editor, translator, poet, curator, philosopher and is currently the Artistic Director at Obalne Gallery, Piran, Slovenia. He has published over 30 publications primarily in art theory and aesthetics and has curated more than 300 exhibitions. Since 1986, Andrej has been the curator of Yugoslavian section at Yugoslavian Pavilion, Venice Biennale. He has also been invloved in many important trip studies including Dunaj, 1972 (Technic and Poetry), Roma 1981-1982 (Nova imagine in Painting and poetry) and in Paris (Artaud, Bataille).
